Clifford Simak - A Death in the House - And Other Stories

Slowly he let the pages slide beneath the slight pressure of his thumb, a gray, fluttering blur of written entries, accumulated through the years—accounts of minor triumphs, of imagined breakthroughs, of recurring failures and ancient disappointments.

Only in the instances of Tuckerman and Henderson, Wolfe reminded himself, was the word “failure” open to doubt. Of all the thousands who had worked on Hourglass through the years, those two alone may have escaped from the present into another past or another future, remote from the here and now.

He got up and put the journal back on the shelf again.

And if there were triumph in Tuckerman and Henderson, he told himself, if there were solution and success, even though it might be lost—then there still was hope.

He crossed the room and went down the central hall. At the outer door the guard saluted him with sleek military poise, as he and others like him had come briskly to attention for so many years in this dooryard area flecked with mottled sunshine filtering through the maples.

“Did you know, sir,” asked the guard, “that Old Molly had her kittens early this morning?”

Wolfe felt his face relax a bit, but he did not smile. “No. How many this time?”

“Four,” said the guard. “One is white and one is gray and the other two are black.”

“Well, that is fine,” said Wolfe. “Thanks for telling me.”

He proceeded along the brick walk, beneath the maple shade, heading for the laboratory-workshops which in the old days, when Hourglass was still in the blueprint stage, had served as barns and stables and other farm outbuildings. Even now, he thought, it was a good place for old mother cats to bring forth their kittens.

In this pleasant land, he thought, the dreams of men and cats—and what would cats dream of? Perhaps of meadow mice and great bowls of yellow cream and a cozy chair set in a magic window through which a gentle, mellow sun would shine forever and forever. Surely not for cats the dreams of inspired madness which scurried like frightened monsters in the minds of men. There was only one reservation which he felt compelled to make. In men the dreams were not entirely madness, for nothing which could be translated into reality and put to practical use could be termed entirely mad.

Here in this quietness of ancient, sun-bleached buildings, of old fields overgrown with briar patches and overrun with rabbits, of lazy meadow stream, and distant hills blue in the tide of noon, Man threw the high, bright impudence of his argument and dreaming straight into the face of Time.

And through the years of setback and of failure Man by his daring had gained a few precarious advances, the rude beginnings of some as yet uncharted science which would someday, perhaps, transform the world.

But more than that: Two men had disappeared!

The path came to an end and Wolfe strode swiftly across the sun-drenched, hard-packed ground of the one-time barnyard. Just inside the first of the barns he halted for an instant, while his eyes adjusted to the soft, cool shadows. As he stood there blinking he heard Joel Strang coming toward him.

“Is that you, Gil?” the young man asked.

“Yes, Joel,” said Wolfe. “How are your pets today?”

“Twelve here. Five gone. I’ve been watching them.”

“You are always watching them.”

“I wonder what they are.”

“I don’t care what they are,” Wolfe told him. “What I want to know is where they go—and how.”

“Not why? ”

“For God’s sake, Joel, why should I care why?”

“Because there just might be some connection. If we knew their purpose and their motive—why they go away, and why they come back again—then perhaps we’d be a little closer to the how of it. If I could only talk with them!”

“You can’t talk with them,” snapped Wolfe. “They’re animals. That’s all. Just alien animals.”

He clamped his mouth so tight that he could feel the muscles knot along his cheek. This was a silly business, he reminded himself, this senseless bickering with Joel Strang about the Whitherers. If the fool thought he could talk with them, let him go ahead and think it. It was no more fantastic than a hundred other things which had been tried in Hourglass.

Not until that moment had Wolfe realized the tension he was laboring under, a tension which he shared with every man on the project. And it could not be attributed solely to Henderson’s disappearance. It was far more than that. It was inseparable from the work itself. It was something that grew and swelled and ballooned inside a man until it almost choked him.

Perhaps, he thought, it had to do with the strange, long-range urgency associated with the project—not a matter of days or months or years, but of centuries. Even more, perhaps, it had to do with the sense of utter doom which would foreshadow the centuries’ end—unless Hourglass could provide an answer, and send Project Paradox into fine-honed action at last.

The urgency of the swiftly passing months and years was something that was personal and understandable—something that any one man could equate with his being. With such an urgency it was win or lose and let’s have it over with. It was a challenge that stirred the blood and sent the breath whistling from a man’s nostrils, and it was accompanied by a feeling of personal and immediate necessity.

But about the longer-range urgency of the centuries there was nothing quite so immediate. The problem was almost an academic one, even though the doom was inexorable. For that very reason a man fought all the time to keep within his mind this feeling of urgency. He woke in the night to scare himself with it. He tried to conjure up the exact, terrifying shape of future doom as a spur to drive himself. And so he fought not one good fight, but two.

Wolfe saw that Strang was looking at him with a perplexed expression.

“I was just thinking, Joel,” he said. “The project has been going on for almost two hundred years and we still haven’t made much progress. We have only the Whitherers, the Telmont Evidence, and the Munn equations. And now two men have disappeared.”

“When it comes,” said Joel, “it will come like that.” He snapped his fingers, rather clumsily.

“Why do you think that?”

“I don’t know,” said Strang.

Wolfe moved toward the cages that housed the Whitherers, Strang falling into step beside him.

Standing in front of a glass-paneled cage, Wolfe wondered if he’d ever be able to look at its denizens without feeling his soul shriveling up inside him. Their hideousness one could understand. But why must they also be so pugnaciously revolting and outrageous. They were no bigger than large rats, with an aspect of having been flayed alive—so swiftly and so recently that they had not had time to bleed.

Wolfe watched them, fascinated, waiting for the blood to ooze, and they stared back at him, impudently. Not quite hatefully, perhaps, but the look in their eyes was not far from hate and it was linked with a sort of arrogant pride that was more than unnerving.

“I know now why I said it would come all at once,” Strang murmured. “I sometimes get the feeling, standing here and watching them, that in just a little while I’ll know what it’s all about.”

“I thought you said there were twelve of them,” said Wolfe. “There are eleven now.”

Strang sighed. “That’s the way it goes all the blessed time. A man can’t keep tab on them.”

Now, Wolfe saw, there were thirteen of them. Out in a blank space of the cage floor, where there had been no Whitherers before, there were now two of them.

“Joel, where do they go? Do you think they move in time?”

“Sometimes I think they do,” said Strang. “If I could only talk with them. …”